This week The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is sponsoring The Shape We’re In, focusing on why nearly two-thirds of Americans are out of shape.

The series kicks off with Experts plotting America’s new diet: Less sprawl, less fat, less frenzy. From the article:  “Right now, 75 percent of all trips less than a mile are taken by car. About 25 percent of people are physically active. Another 50 percent do a little activity. And 25 percent do virtually nothing.“

Here’s my take on it.  If you’ve got nothing to do and nowhere to go, then of course you’ll do nothing and go nowhere.  It’s all about having choices, and unfortunately the industrial, mass production economy doesn’t provide much.  However, the good news is we’re transitioning to an information-based, mass customization era of multiple choices, and that means more of us will get to live in cool towns where we have ten options each night to entertain ourselves within walking distance, rather than two (watch TV or surf the internet).

Investing in Community

For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown.  Here’s how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:

1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it’s the cultural creatives.  Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize.  Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents.  This is the common interest that initially draws people together.
2. Build numerous third places for them to meet spontaneously, frequently, for longer periods of time.  My favorite outdoor version is the piazza.  The most well-known indoor version is Starbucks, though I much rather prefer independent owners who care more about the local community.
3. Host lots of events in these third places, the piazza and the parks, especially if it involves the unifying vibes of music and art.
4. Establish ongoing community programs for the residents and workers that inspire them to collaborate, barter, network and find common recreational or work-related interests.
5. I could list about fifty more lines, but that’s beyond the typical web viewer’s attention span.

Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.

When we think of ‘friends’, we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with.  However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs.  Either way, they typically aren’t very diverse.

I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques.  Rather than asking the people in your clique what they’d like to do on Friday night week after week, more people will be choosing among myriad entertainment choices first, then meeting up spontaneously with people they know there.  Why?  In our evolution towards diversity, tolerance and choice and away from exclusivity, it’s a natural progression.  It encourages individuals to do what they’re most passionate about, find out what’s really out there and still have the best of friends, maybe even better ones. It’s up to us to provide enough of those choices in the towns we build.

Actually, the verdict isn’t in yet, but the way I’m hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday’s blog).  Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go.  June 3rd’s our first happy hour, so I’ll let you know then how it went.  Update: How it went!

As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that’s a strength of where I work at the shared suite of workspaces at the Affinity Lab.  Simply put, the entire workplace is like a big living room, complete with a central lounging area of couches, big comfy chair and coffee table full of magazines.

There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul.  Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.

Here’s my recipe to get to know your neighbors:

1. As painful as it is for some of us, you’re going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them.  This forms the ‘neighborhood core’.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most common area that everyone walks through.  In our case, it was the lobby.  Make sure the neighborhood core is there from the start.  People attract people.
b. At the event, play music on a portable (I use my iBook) with decent speakers, something upbeat and energizing, like Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up.
c. Get an event sponsor for free beer and wine.  Save the leftovers for the next quarterly event.
3. Get everyone to sign up on a building listserv.  You can create a free one here.  Use this to ask people to bring stuff to the next event, sell or give away things, or ask for help.
4. Reap the benefits!  Let’s see, since I’ve gotten to know my neighbors I’ve gotten a lot of free furniture and fix-it advice, along with numerous happy hours, social dinners, parties, snowball fights, movie nights, off-the-wall events and yes, a sense of community.

Where is that elusive sense of community?

It’s something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there’s even a book written about it.  Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed?  History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.

This week I’ll present places I’ve experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns.  I’ll start with Hawaii, since it’s regarded by its residents as having an incredible sense of community, and it’s also where I grew up.

In Hawaii, friends are called uncles and aunties, and strangers are viewed as friends.  The ethnicities are so diverse and tolerant that it seems 90% of all the jokes told by comedians in Hawaii reflect cultural differences, something that is considered offensive (and sadly so) in the U.S. mainland.  Spontaneous get-togethers to play ukulele and dance are the norm, people come early and leave late to help out, and even the Aloha Spirit is state law.

Where did this come from?  Part of it is best explained by understanding Hawaii’s plantation history in the first half of the 20th Century when corporate plantation owners lured thousands of workers from around the world (including my grandparents).  What’s noteworthy is that they were mixed together, all the better to fight with one another than to rebel against the plantation owners over what became false promises and inhumane working conditions.  At first they did clash, but once they realized the futility of it all they began sharing their language (today’s Pidgin English), food and eventually their resources to work together and gain their freedom.

Investing in A&E CoolTowns

Here’s the experience arts & entertainment vision an investment collaborative will be implementing in a few lucky cities around the country.

1. To have an onsite residency of artists, musicians, video producers, entertainers and entrepreneurs, they will ensure a substantial amount of affordable, well-designed housing and workspace (see last week’s blogs.)
2. To catalyze ongoing performances, practices, dances and major live events, they will provide ‘stages’ via a piazza, a 30,000 sf community center/dance/concert hall and multiple small-venue third places.
3. To allow the artists in the community to collaborate with each other, they will build an arts & entertainment intranet to share songs, videos, images and files over an ultra-high-speed fiber optic network.
4. To help these artists create revenue, they will provide $2 million in matching grants to utilize technology in the distribution and marketing of their music, dance, film and art around the world.
5. To support local talent and help create a happening social scene, they’ll consider initiating contemporary versions of American Bandstand and teen dance centers that flourished during the heyday of the fifties and sixties.

You can track their progress here.

The economy of an A&E CoolTown

As usual, business-related decisions come down to money and economics.  So how do we create an economically sustainable environment for artists & entertainers?

Increase their revenue: Provide multiple places for them to perform or display their talent regularly, establish the first ever neighborhood-branded ‘one-click’ online store for their work in digital format, offer collaborative educational courses at permanent classrooms, form a local guild to market their talent collectively and support a local A&E channel showcasing regional talent 24 hours a day.

Decrease their expenses: Offer low-rent/mortgage homes and workspace, provide a low-cost community multimedia production studio, enact tax breaks, establish a trade-for-services system that substitutes time for money and build a national product distribution system that works on contingency fees rather than upfront capital.

Tomorrow:  What it all looks like and what some visionary investors are proposing.

A wise man* once told me that the key to building a community is getting the tenants committed first, as in before design, permitting, capital raising, construction, etc.

So, the first step in the implementation of a great arts & entertainment (A&E) town would mean building a virtual community of artists and entertainers.  That was crystalized to me tonight when I stopped by a hosted reception of those practicing in and supportive of A&E .  Not only did they already have a virtual community, but they all clearly understood the multiplying benefits of building a counterpart physical community, especially one with complementary tenants in marketing and distribution technology that could significantly grow their business.

So, after meeting a painter, a musician, a singer and a producer tonight (as well as a dance instructor, film maker and photographer the previous night) and hearing their genuine enthusiasm for the social and economic benefits of building a cooltown (physically and virtually), I knew I was on the right track.

*The legendary Joe Alfandre, founder of Kentlands and my good buddy.

In my opinion, this is one of the most important elements in building a place that cultural creatives will be attracted to.  At least one economically successful city swears by it.

The easiest way to realize the power of music is to understand history.  For instance, in the book Capitol Rock, the author describes Washington DC’s Georgetown renaissance in the 1960’s, when Beatlemania with its wake of local rock & roll bands and bohemian crowds sparked the transformation of a “bleak concentration of neighborhood shops and restaurants” into what is today the city’s nightlife centerpiece.  Live bands and artists gained exposure nationally through American Bandstand, and locally through teen dance centers that rocked on weekend nights.  Two older ladies in my building will attest to that, “It was a lot of fun back then.“

Now, take Jane Jacob’s diversity requirements for a great city, which calls for major amenities that draw large crowds amid residential neighborhoods of small blocks with old and new buildings, and you’ve got the CoolTown recipe for building a music scene.